Am I keyword stuffing my titles?

[MarieHaynes]

I run a site where I answer questions.  As I answer each question I choose a title for the page.  I have been trying to get good keywords in my titles, but now I am wondering if I have been keyword stuffing them and perhaps I should be more succinct.

So, let's say I had a question about a sore back.  Here would be the title tag I would use:

Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help.  | My Main Keyword

That's a fictitious example, but the idea is that I would be trying to get the keywords "back", "sore", "spinal", "pain", "relief" "help" and my main website keyword into the title.

As I'm writing this I'm seeing the folly in this.  I think it would likely be much better to simply have a title of

Why is my back sore?

So, I have three questions:

1. Is it better to have a succinct title targeting one keyword/keyword phrase than to get lots of keywords in my title?

2. Should I be putting my main keyword after each of my title?  Shortly after doing this on 1700+ pages I was #1 for my main keyword.  But, I was also doing other things as well to boost my presence for this keyword.

3. If I decide to do more succinct titles, how would you suggest I go about running a test to see which is better?

Looking forward to your responses!  Thanks!

[AaronSchinke]

There is a lot to this question. I think the way you are doing titles now is probably great for increasing the click through, mostly because they are in context. I would venture to guess you may be able to get more impressions by changing this up, but I always recommend quality over quantity. This being said I have NO IDEA what your traffic goals/stats look like. Good Luck!

[Entrusteddev]

1. Try to avoid spamming keywords into your titles. Keep them Short(ish), informative and helpful.

Maybe a title of "Why is my back sore? asked in Back & Neck Pain". This assumes your categories questions, so the "Back & Neck Pain" bit is your category title.

2. Having a keyword in thousands of page title is not going to be of any significant benefit to your site and it rankings.

3. I would gauge the success by simply applying your new found titling technique to the next few questions you process, follow their success and compare to previous questions.

Keep in mind that your existing 1700 pages may be getting ranked well for phrases which are well optimised in your current titling system. perhaps only apply the new technique to new questions only.

Good luck

[EGOL]

"Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help."

I like the above for the reasons below.

--  I believe that questions elicit clicks better than statements.

--  You have lots of potential keywords in the title tag.  Will work great for pulling in long tail traffic

I believe that the succinct title is good when you have a very powerful site and are gunning for a very basic and difficult keyword.  However, if you use that succinct title on lots of pages then you will run into duplication.   The longer title will diversify your optimization and pull a greater diversity of traffic.

[EGOL]

"spamming keywords"

I think that "spamming" occurs when you have keywords in the title that are not descriptive of the article.....

or....  when you just make a big list of keywords without composing them into a coherent question or statement...

I think that "Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help." is not in the "spam" category.  (although I might shorten it down to about 60 characters)

[MarieHaynes]

Ah, thanks EGOL!

So, I will experiment with taking the site keyword off of the end, but keep doing what I am doing with my question titles.

But, perhaps, if I am writing an article about a specific problem I will have a succinct title there.

[SteveOllington]

If the title is relevant to the content then that's good, but from a technical sense: You shouldn't repeat any word in a title more than twice, and each instance of that word should be separated by at least one other word. Then, you have to think about what the titles are going to be on your other pages, I'd say you're more in danger of keyword canibalization within your title in that example than of keyword stuffing (assuming the rest of the site is about back pain, etc...).